


The Development of Shame

by MostRemote



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh!
Genre: Gen, Masturbation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-30
Updated: 2012-05-30
Packaged: 2017-11-06 07:29:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/416279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MostRemote/pseuds/MostRemote
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kaiba's sexual development might not have been the smoothest or easiest, but he continues to try, in his own esoteric way, to understand himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Development of Shame

 

Seto's modest sex education comprised in its entirety (one) two by three and a half inches of finely printed text and (two) twin labelled diagrams of the male and female human anatomy. Neither text nor pictures could be figured into any context resembling the erotic, for the text was largely comprised of unromantic technical vocabulary (spermatozoa, ovum, frenulum) and the pictures were greyish dissections that only faintly echoed the appearance of human genitalia. Seto learned by heart the strangely shaped words and tried without success to connect them with the reality of his body. The illustrations, slices of dully coloured entrails, were perfectly alien in their clinical coolness, and so while Seto learned how to articulate himself, how to label his every intimate part, any capacity for sexuality existed as pure theory.

The cynical observer might be forgiven for thinking that this education was not designed for someone who was ever actually intended to engage in sexual behaviour. He was given a perfect roadmap for his most private areas with no indication what the destination might be. It might as well have been a string of numbers plugged into a computer for all the use it was for sexual self-discovery. Masturbation was not in the syllabus. Coitus existed as only a distant algorithm.

These absences did not matter much to Seto in those early years. Had someone suggested masturbation to him he would have recoiled at the idea. The possibility of taking pleasure in his own body would have seemed absurd. It was a young, ugly body which only served as a prison to a mind that was far, far greater than its little limbed host. It made people treat him like a child, an idiot child permitted to move among the business world only as a curiosity. Nobody really  _cared_ about his updated designs for the KX-4 chip or how, since turning twelve, he had completely reshaped KaibaCorp.'s roster and increased net profits by a solid 6.3%. A child who spoke like an adult was still a child.

And, secretly, Seto believed that.

For all his skilful manipulation, for all his flawless adaptation from topic to topic when it came to business and finances and politics, there were still arenas of the adult world that lay far beyond his grasp.

Sex hung heavy and intangible in the air at every business party. An incomprehensible constant, Seto tried ignoring it, tried navigating it, but it remained slyly unbreachable. The adults took swift note of his visible discomfort when sex slid its way into the conversation and quickly took to employing a mild vulgarity or grotesque innuendo the moment they thought little Kaiba Seto was getting a bit too big for his boots. No one approved of this prodigy, this  _child_  who had appeared unbidden in their midst as though he was worthy of their interest, and no one was willing to come to his aid when the talk about him became so thick with sex that he was left adrift, nigh drowning. Seto was forced to follow at Gozaburo's heels like a mute animal, barred from any meaningful discussion by this  _thing_ , this  _sex_ , that excited and infected the air of every business function he attended.

At thirteen, he'd had enough. He had Isono give him 'the talk'. He took notes.

He attempted masturbation once, as an experiment, but the strangeness and offensiveness of it prevented him from experiencing anything akin to pleasure or satisfaction. It seemed ludicrous that the soft, warm slip of flesh between his thighs could ever be connected with what the cold words in his biology textbook described. He never got on with his own physicality. If only he could smooth his body, all its bumps and dark bits, into cool, featureless porcelain.

And yet adolescence came unbidden, a series of inconveniences offset by his broken voice and substantial growth spurt. Being able to look his business partners in the eye or, as more often happened, from a foot above them did much to take the sting out of their snideness and feigned superiority, particularly after Gozaburo's death. It was somewhat startling for Seto to realise, when he caught his black suited reflection on the morning of the funeral, that he had grown into a vague approximation of a man.

Sex once again became a question mark, quietly demanding his attention. At sixteen, in the shower, he had his first discomfiting orgasm. He had wanted to indulge his curiosity and indulge he did, and how horrifyingly easy it was to lose himself in the thoughtless heat of it all, thrusting against his palm, mind blanked, reduced to pure physical desire and not even caring how ridiculous the whole thing was. Seto had never felt so low or helpless. He resolved never to do it again.

And yet sex did not go away. It still hung about his mind, irritating him, granting him an awareness of his and others' bodies that he had never wanted. He took notice of the curve of the female breast, of the hint of genitalia between a man's clothed legs, but notice these things though he did they still floated free and disconnected from sex. He had no desire to press himself against any of these bodies and for a short while he thought he might have escaped the burden of sex, but then the dreams started.

They were utterly sexless, Seto noted with genuine confusion, and yet he would wake to a sticky wet patch on his sheets, or would be woken during by the force of his own orgasm, which always left him cold and slightly nauseous.

He had had recurring dreams about losing games for years, since he was a very young child, and it took Seto some time to note the correlation between his sexless wet dreams and the familiar nightmare of failure and humiliation. He was quite certain that he was not aroused by losing card games (though he tried and failed to figure it in an absurd sexual context to make sure), and so the relationship between the two ever co-occurring events of wet sheets and embarrassing nightmares went unexplained.

Revolted by the dreams and still plagued by a nonsensical preoccupation with something he didn't want and didn't understand, Seto was forced to conclude that his body craved sexual release significantly more than his mind reviled it. Thus he reluctantly permitted himself the occasional, unpleasant session of self-abuse -for that's what it was, really- in the shower where he could be as divorced from the sweat and stickiness of the thing as possible. He didn't do it often, once a month perhaps, and it was always so much of a emotional chore that he swore in the aftermath of depleted lust that it really,  _really_ couldn't be worth it. And yet, a month later, he would find himself trying and failing to ignore his hot, red erection as the water pounded against it. His resolve melted into mercury and he gave into delicious, disgusting ecstasy.

And so this was how it went for a year or so, his entire sexuality confined to monthly bouts of nauseating, controlled release, along with the occasional intrusive dream. He only ever did it in the shower; it was the only place suitably clean and clinical for it. It felt almost medical, which was a strange comfort to him, as though he was simply performing a routine check up or a non-invasive operation. He tried to think of himself as a surgeon, but instead  _pathologist_  came violently to mind.

The act was comfortingly repetitive, always the same motions eliciting the same pleasure, but that was the only comfort to it. The thought of it filled him with unease. He tried to avoid even thinking the word 'masturbation', though his own avoidance of it angered him. It was pathetic to not be able to even name it.

Despite the comfortably uncomfortable routine, so much went unanswered. His four thirty alarm wrenched him one day from a hot, itching dream of something inexplicably erotic and despite his morning exercise routine and a cool shower the heat refused to dissipate. The ghost of his own genitalia came to his mind's eye over and over, rubbing against his skull insistently, demanding selfish, shameful attention, and he let it command his focus to the point that he half considered leaving work early to deal with the damn thing and finish work at home.

He managed to wait it out, however, though his mind constantly drifted to his beautiful bathroom and the close intimacy of his shower until he arrived home. Once alone in his bathroom he stripped rapidly and formed a tightly folded pile of clothes, his mind and body buzzing discordantly.

Wet and warm in the embrace of the shower, he found himself hesitating. He confronted again the questions that he thought he had dismissed long ago:  _is this healthy? Do other people feel like this? Should I give it up completely? Could I even stop if I wanted to? Am I that weak?_

He drowned out the questions by jerking his face upwards into the force of the water, his eyes burning behind their lids, his skull burning, his palm burning around his erection...

Seto did not fantasise. He did not need people, not in any situation. He did not need to trick himself into believing he was not alone when he did this. Sex held no interest for him, not the act of it. Intercourse, fucking, whatever. The thought of letting another human being touch him the way he touched himself provoked a revulsion so intense he wanted to vomit. He did  _not_ fantasise. He didn't need it.

Instead he thought of the sea, mountains, buildings, aeroplanes. It wasn't erotic -he wasn't entertaining his mind, after all- but it provided a soothing screensaver. Power, vastness, speed... Even if he wanted to fantasise about a person, who the hell would he think about? A man, a woman? He wasn't interested in people and he wasn't going to start experimenting now with some tawdry fantasy.

He wondered, abstractly, what other people fantasised about. The sort of material he had seen in his brief brushes with pornography, he supposed. Did Yuugi watch that sort of thing? God, did  _Mokuba_?

His hand faltered and he forced himself to white out. The night ocean: black, waves whispering. Lake Inawashiro, the spread wings of the swans. He breathed, and an unbidden smirk tilted his lips as he thought,  _Jounouchi certainly watches pornography. Fucking commoner._

And there he was all of a sudden, standing eidetically clear before Seto's closed eyes, Yuugi beside him, the two of them standing with folded arms and humoured smiles.

Seto's eyes shot open.  _No. No, come on._

Jounouchi's grin, wide with gross delight as his voice sounded light and teasing:  _What's wrong, Kaiba? That stick up your ass too tightly wedged to even bring yourself off?_ Yuugi's soft smile, pity masking his revulsion, full of gentle condescension:  _Perhaps you shouldn't be doing this, Kaiba. You're too immature for this. Just go back to your bed, don't worry about it._

They would think him disgusting, look at him as though he was something horrible, nausea undercutting the humoured tint of their expressions. Behind them a crowd of old associates, laughter lightly rippling their mouths, his foster father among them. Everyone would know what the little boy did, so desperate to be a grown up, so pathetic and slick and naked...

_Think of rain, Summer rain,_  his mind ran in desperation. He saw for an instant the sky's grey vault and felt the rain on his face, but the rain hit him hot and pounded against his naked skin, between his legs, and the laughter echoed on. The seas shrivelled into puddles, the mountains crumbled, everything good and clean and peaceful was sloughed from his mind to leave only the profane, and his hand still worked at himself, the pleasure continued to crest...

He slapped his palms against the shower stall on either side of him, pushing outwards, denying himself any physical stimulation.  _No._  The hatred in their eyes, the jeering laughter, a collar around his neck, shame and, and, and...

_I am weak, I am weak..._

Seto wished he couldn't hear the long, broken keen that tumbled past his lips as his erection, twitching desperately, ejaculated without the need of his hands. Everything went very white and quiet, his ears ringing and the water tapping metallic against his skull, and when he opened his eyes he realised it was over.

His eyes were compulsively drawn to the thick, cloudy substance that had stuck to the smooth shower tile opposite. He looked at it slimy upon the wall, like something dead, something aborted and wet. It progressed slowly and unevenly down the tile in an unsteady slide towards the drain and waste, mesmerising in its pure physical existence. That it was something that came out of him was absurd. He could wash it away, but it wouldn't really  _leave_. It would wind its way into the pipes, contaminate everything, get into the sewage system and mix with  _other_  people's waste, and he couldn't, he just couldn't...

He was too absorbed in the present moment to really process what was happening until a few seconds later, when he suddenly became aware once more of his body, of the position of his knees, and the taste in his mouth.

He stood quickly. It was done. It was over. He felt as though he had killed someone. He could still make out the slight disturbances in the natural slickness of the water tile made by his own saliva, the smallest bubbles of spit which, too, were tainted even in his attempts to clean it away.

Seto splashed water over the tiles and turned his back on them, trying forget which tile had been contaminated so he could put this out of his mind. He tilted his head back and parted his lips, letting the sweetly metallic hot water flood his mouth, rinsing out the taste of himself but never quite cleansing himself completely no matter how much he swilled and swallowed and coughed water up again.

_This is the last time_ , he decided, beginning his shower routine with unusual roughness.  _Never again. I don't need this._

He had preferred it when sex was only a collection of clinical sentences, not this endless unanswered question that came back to him again and again. Nobody needed this.

He watched the water gush down the gleaming drain and watched with it the invisible traces of saliva and semen, of his shame and disgust, and waited for some feeling of cleanliness to descend upon him again.


End file.
